David Morales, director of the Spanish security company UC Global SL that spied on Julian Assange for the CIA during his stay as an asylum seeker at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was a collaborator of the National Intelligence Centre (CNI), according to emails intercepted on the electronic devices seized by the police after his arrest in Jerez de la Frontera in September 2019.
In addition to this documentary evidence, to which Morning Express has had access, three sources linked to the Spanish intelligence services and collaborators of Morales confirm that the former military man worked on different operations for the intelligence service. “Relax, I am with God, with the one here and the one there,” he confessed to a person he trusted who warned him of the limits and risks of this activity. An official spokesperson for the CNI declined to answer questions from this newspaper.
The evidence linking the former marine to the CNI has appeared in new dumps of his mobile phones and was not included in the first copy that the police gave to the National Court judge who has been investigating the case for five years. Morales’ relationship with the Spanish intelligence service and the evidence that suggests that information about the Wikileaks founder’s meetings with his lawyers was given to the CIA give a new dimension to a case that has escalated to a New York court where victims of espionage have sued Mike Pompeo, former director of the US secret service. Assange, now free, spent 12 years in prison for leaking more than 250,000 classified documents from the US State Department in November 2010. Morning Express was one of the media that participated in the concerted effort to publish these documents.
Sole interlocutor
On June 27, 2016, Morales sent an internal communication to his employees from his corporate email entitled “Contact with intelligence agency.” It said: “I am contacting you in order to inform you that we have learned of the interest on the part of Spanish intelligence units (CNI) in knowing or having information related to our actions, missions or work. We have even contacted and requested the collaboration (transfer of information) of the agents and operations that are assigned to these different missions.”
The director of UC Global SL, whose agency was already in charge of security at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, explained to them that his company’s activities were “easily monitored” and added that in the event that their missions were of “national interest and did not affect the interests of our clients, there is no problem in establishing an appropriate collaboration and with a single transmission channel, that is, through me.” [sic]”. And he warned that if any agent or collaborator of any national or foreign intelligence service contacted them, they should be told: “the procedure is to communicate with me.” The warning was accompanied by a threat: they would be fired if they did not proceed in this manner. “It will be hard for me to have to let go of any of you due to breaches of trust,” he added.
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A few months earlier, in March of the same year 2016, one of the collaborators of UC Global SL wrote to Morales informing him that “the CNI wants to count on us” for some courses in a shooting range” in a gallery in the barracks of the Marine Infantry Regiment in San Fernando (Cádiz).
Report on a former director of the CNI
Other emails from Morales, dated three years later, between February and March 2019, show his participation in the preparations for a meeting between the company Advanced Security Business Group SL, owned by the former director of the CNI (2004-2009) José Alberto Saiz Cortés, and an Indra collaborator.
The former military officer wrote to the latter and sent him a report on the company of the former head of the CNI, a consultancy firm in national and international security, according to his website. “I am attaching a brief report on the company with which you will be in contact tomorrow so that you can get an idea of it, although I think you already have an idea knowing the profile of the person in charge,” says one of the emails, referring to the former head of the Spanish secret service.
The former director of the CNI, appointed by José Bono, then Minister of Defense, was dismissed from his post after the newspaper The World published the use of secret service funds for travel and personal hobbies. Saiz is a senior technical engineer at Montes and continues to head his security company. This newspaper has not been able to obtain his version.
Morales was arrested two months after an investigation by this newspaper published the audios and videos that his employees recorded of the Australian activist with his lawyers, doctors and visitors inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he was being held. This material was presented as evidence in a complaint filed by Assange and the National Court is investigating him for crimes of violation of lawyer-client communications, misappropriation and money laundering.
The lawsuit filed in New York by several victims of espionage has forced CIA Director William J. Burns to testify. The head of the intelligence service has hid behind the National Security Act of 1947 and the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1940 to not provide the New York judge with any information “because it could cause serious damage to the security of the United States.”
Following his lengthy imprisonment, Assange, 52, was released on June 25 after signing an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice in which he pleaded guilty to violating the Espionage Act and accepted a five-year prison sentence already served in London’s Belmarsh prison.
Research@elpais.es
